Buried beneath the hotel chains and amusement parks lies an ecosystem of microentrepreneurs. Savvy tourists are straying off the beaten path, unraveling cultural experiences, besting commercial locales.

“They’re tired of getting the pseudo-experiences every time; they want to speak with the locals in a given area or rediscover the area they live in,” said Duarte Morais, a professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management. “It gives you an access to the eclectic, colorful, unique world around us.”

Morais researched how tourism generally fails to bring equitable prosperity among local people in destination communities.

“Local people get low paying jobs and tourism grows without their involvement or control,” Morais said. “Instead of benefitting the local community, tourism consumes local cultures and special places.”

Upon his arrival at NC State in 2010, Morais found the solution to this discrepancy: microentrepreneurship.

“Even though some websites were getting started, it was only connecting people like you and me — visiting and buying services from other connected people,” Morais said. “But what about in rural areas and poor, developing countries?”

Collaborating with colleagues in computer science and other disciplines, he created People-First Tourism (P1t).

Morais, the lead instigator of P1t Lab, alongside co-founders John Bass, Gene Brothers and Tim Wallace, aimed to create a web marketplace that allows less-resourced people who were not connected to the web to sell experiences online. Tourists find appealing experiences on the website and then make bookings.

“The concept behind our business is to connect to microentrepreneurs by SMS with a web application that faces the tourist market,” said Bass, technical director of the Institute for Next Generation IT Systems. “It’s bridging the people who have been historically and systemically cut off from web marketplace opportunities; many of whom don’t have internet access.”

Bass worked alongside Morais and the P1t Lab, researching the cost of making reservation inquiries to people overseas and explored international money transfer methods, such as PayPal.

The company exists on a global scale, involving hundreds of microentrepreneurs, students and faculty.

“There’s a community of computer scientists and social scientists across campus; we meet every week, have coffee together, go to conferences and the field together,” Morais said. “It’s a cross-pollination of knowledge. I’m becoming more versed in computer science and computer science faculty and students are becoming more cognizant of the intricacies of critical social science.”

Moreover, P1t, Inc. is a social venture, pursuing conscientious capitalism to coalesce the promotion of equitable economic prosperity in tourism destination communities and cultural exploration for visitors. From a nominal standpoint, the company places an emphasis on “people first.”

“A key aspect of our work is that we never deal with a microentrepreneur just once,” Morais said. “We visit them repeatedly. We received a grant to post pictures of some of them. People belong to regional networks, which support each other. We encourage them to get organized to have a potluck, once or twice a year; we tell them how the company is going, and ask them about how it is going for them. We try to create a sense of community.”

The company donates royalties earned by the inventors and co-founders to the People-First Innovation Fund for scholarships and student and faculty research. P1t Lab involves student engagement, research and software development, which is separate from the company itself.

Every semester, faculty take students to visit P1t microentrepreneurs to get an understanding of how locals aspire to get involved in tourism business. Faculty encourages their students to keep up with the growth of microentrepreneurs via email, postcards and field visits.

P1t Lab members travel to participating communities to identify and connect with potential partners or organizations.

“We contact them and sometimes we go visit them and get a sense for them,” Morais said. “If it’s a good match, we start talking about creating an experience based on their understanding of the market and their interests. It’s a coaching process.”

Beyond their day jobs, microentrepreneurs are eager to share passions of crafting, brewing, farm life, carving walking sticks, dancing, etc. Often facing low resources, they rely on less meaningful jobs to support their lives. With the income generated from tourism microentrepreneurship, some have been able to devote themselves to their passions full time.

“In the social pyramid, there’s a point where people live and face adversity, but still have a sense of self-efficacy and an eagerness to fight for their livelihoods,” Morais said. “Below that, there might be people who are so beaten down they’ve lost their hope and motivation. But there’s a good number of people who are eager to earn their way to self-reliance and just needed that extra push.”

P1t Lab members often assist microentrepreneurs in applying for local grants, writing letters of recommendation and in registering to sell products online. Nevertheless, there are some instances in which the microentrepreneurs are on the verge of giving up.  

“It’s a difficult place to be as a researcher — seeing the difficulties lived by some of the people I’ve come to love and understand,” Morais said. Tourism is a seasonal endeavor. If microentrepreneurs don’t see results right away, they are often forced to forgo the opportunity to earn income through tourism microentrepreneurship and instead have to turn to other less desired jobs.

Currently, P1t experiences are available in the United States, South Africa, Costa Rica and Guatemala. Other countries are in the early stages of joining, such as Portugal, Brazil, India, Nepal, Japan and the Philippines.

“We’re talking with professors in universities there who are really excited,” Morais said. “We want to manage a gradual growth for the project, so we can maintain the integrity of the research and student engagement, as well as the feasibility of the social venture.”

Recently, Bass and Morais partook in village tours in South Africa, while conducting fieldwork for the P1t project.

“Everything you do in the village is perceived based on how it affects everybody else in the community,” Bass said. “I realized how important it is for people like us to hear this. We all have our own goals, aspirations, our own jobs, and there’s an assumption that whatever is good for us is good for everybody else. It’s just how we do things. It’s really cool to see other ways of life that people are happy with. It challenges the assumption that we have the best way of life.”

According to Bass, experiencing different perspectives is part of what makes People-First Tourism special.

“If we can make these moments happen, we’re successful,” Bass said. “The whole concept that we have built is astounding; it’s deep, it’s rich, it’s academia and it’s business. There are so many students and institutions involved. It’s more than just a startup company. It’s an ecosystem that’s been slowly pieced together and is growing on its own. And that’s a lot of fun to see.”

Looking forward, Bass has visions of a platform that would not only allow travelers to review microentrepreneurs’ services, but let microentrepreneurs review the travelers.

“It’s the cutting edge of tourism, sharing economy of how people are using the internet to meet each other and exchange services, bypassing retail monopolies,” Morais said. “We are giving shape to the new age of tourism.”

To find out more about People-First Tourism, visit its website.   

A version of this article appeared in print on Aug. 18, 2016 on page 4 with the headline: “People-First Tourism bypasses retail monopolies”.